The way Americans talk about China can often seem hostile, frustrating, or altogether irreconcilable with the world as a newcomer from China knows it

Wang Chengdong, a Chinese student in Missouri State University's Executive MBA program, works in a library study room / AP

Every September,
the price of a flight from China to a major American metropolis like Boston or New
York soars. In addition to the usual stream of business managers and tourists
shuffling between the two countries is the annual inflow of young Chinese,
girls in ponytails and boys in sneakers, headed to their American colleges. Backpacks
hiked up on their shoulders and suitcases rolling behind, they carry transparent
plastic folders with neatly arranged sheets and pamphlets showing their first
destination on the new soil: Yale University, Hamilton College, University of
Wisconsin Madison, University of South Florida, USC School of Cinematic Arts.

In the past decade, China has witnessed an explosion in the number
of citizens studying abroad, a 21st-century manifestation of a deep-rooted
Confucius value that emphasizes education. Even before they enter high school,
children of middle class families from cities across China start to see liuxue --
studying abroad -- as the default choice. They devote hours of their class time
to preparing for American standardized exams from the SAT and GRE to the International
English Language Testing System, often scoring in the top quartile. In 2010,
nearly 130,000 Chinese students studied in the U.S., a 30 percent increase from
the year before. Having surpassed India, China is now America's top source of
international students.

I jumped on
the wagon myself in the September of 2005, traveling to far-away Massachusetts
for the last two years of high school. After the initial elation of reaching my
long-strived-for goal cooled and I figured out my way around the language
barrier, I realized that there were bigger hurdles than language for a Chinese
student in America. China and its rise were receiving more attention and
discussion in the U.S. First as undergraduate in Connecticut and then as a New
York Times intern in Beijing, I plunged into the China-related discussions, hoping
to gain an alternate, more comprehensive perspective on my home country. But I
often find myself wrestling with an instinctive compulsion to take China's side,
a feeling not unfamiliar to many Chinese students in the States.

American political discourse -- and American criticism of
China -- can clash, sometimes painfully so, with the more closed and more
uniformly nationalistic social norms Chinese students are accustomed to. Their
desire to share in American prosperity and their admiration for its fair social
values are often complicated by a defensiveness of their homeland, instilled in
them by a nationalistic atmosphere back home and compounded by an American
tendency to talk about China in ways that can sometimes sound condescending,
even hostile. Reconciling these feelings and gaining a balanced perspective can
turn out to be much more difficult than, for example, the GRE vocabulary
section.

• • • • •

On American
campuses, Chinese students often steer clear of political debate, something
they likely had few encounters with during their single-track life path prior
to their arrival in America. Students now in their late teens or early 20s missed
their country's brief period of relative political pluralism in mid-1980s, which
was ended by the violent Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. Instead, they grew
up in the pragmatism-defined 1990s, which propelled citizens to trade political
rights for material affluence. Champions of China's lopsided education system,
they devoted after-class hours to hone their quantitative skills and memorized verbatim
their history and political science textbooks to pass the humanities exams.

After a lifetime of experiencing conformity as the social norm,
Chinese students are sometimes amazed by the politically charged conversations
and expressions common in America. The night Barack Obama was elected
president, I watched from my dormitory balcony the carnival-like celebration at
my college courtyard, reading the banners and listening to the chants,
fascinated by the burst of energy. The scene felt strange yet familiar -- I
recalled the joyous parades when Hong Kong returned to China and the cheering
crowds when the Olympic committee announced Beijing to be the host city for the
2008 games. But the differences became clear when this political energy took
other forms in America. "When I started reading American news, it was
incredible to see the two parties throwing rocks at each other," April Sun, a native
of Liaoning province in northeast China and a graduate student in education at
George Mason University, told me. "I thought, 'How could you have disagreement in
front of the public?'"

Amazement
aside, the majority of Chinese students, busy adjusting to the new environment,
spare little attention to American political bickering as long as their
homeland is not involved. However, as America's attention shifts toward China, they
often find themselves caught between two more or less opposing ideological
camps.

Chinese students typically choose to withhold their opinions
for fear of remafan ­-- causing trouble. When Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won
the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2010, liberal intellectuals in mainland China
held underground celebrations and threw secret banquets (despite the
government's attempt to block them), while Chinese students in America seemed
to remain eerily silent. "We shouldn't talk about it," a Chinese student at
Yale University told me in a private message at the time. "We should focus on
studying and doing things we can do. Truth comes from practice." The habit of
self-censoring, common among China's post-1980s youth, can feel both
frustrating and bewildering, even to some within the generation. Jiang
Fangzhou, a 23-year-old Chinese writer, calls this phenomenon an "active effort
to maintain status quo." These students, she said in an interview with the Financial
Times, "dare not stray from the orthodoxy for even one millimeter when they are
still 10 meters away from crossing the line."

Though
their silence on politics could be mistaken for nonchalance, it's anything but.
When a fellow Chinese student in the U.S. deviates from the political orthodoxy,
the otherwise quiet community can sometimes erupt. In April 2008, a month after
a bloody clash between ethnic Tibetans and Han Chinese in the Tibetan city of Lhasa,
a Duke freshmen named Wang Qianyuan became a household
name among the Chinese community in America. During a confrontation between
Tibetan and Han Chinese students during a pro-Tibet vigil on campus, she agreed
to write "Free Tibet, Save Tibet" on one Tibetan student's back. Witnessing the
scene, her fellow Chinese schoolmates lashed out, calling her a traitor and
ostracizing her.

"They said that I had mental problems and that I would go to
hell," she writes in a personal account published
by the Washington Post. "There's a strong Chinese view nowadays that critical
thinking and dissidence create problems, so everyone should just keep quiet and
maintain harmony."

Many
students shrug off the incongruity of choosing a Western education at the cost
of tens of thousands of dollars a year and resisting the ideological
environment that comes with it. For them, the primary draw of an American
education is the socially recognized prestige that brightens their job prospects.
Serena Zhang, a Georgetown junior from Shanghai, said she applied to U.S. colleges
because she considers herself "qualified for them" and "they bring more
opportunities." She beamed as she recounted working alongside a senior boss in the
American consulting firm that employed her, something she feels would be "hardly
possible in China without a connection." Although she grumbled about the
"arbitrary and alienating" U.S. media coverage of China, she said it was
"unnecessary to dwell upon the details."

• • • • •

As a
student in the United States, I yearned for a forum to talk and share thoughts
on events back in China: an earthquake in Sichuan, the Olympic Games in
Beijing, a Uighur uprising in Xinjiang. But the silence of the campus Chinese
community, initially disappointing, became almost suffocating. So I turned to
Western media, hoping its open civil discourse could help me make sense of my
country. The daily headlines on China gave me feelings of liberation as well as
unease: "On Our Radar: China's Environmental Woes," "In Restive Chinese Area,
Cameras Keep Watch," "Behind a Military Chill: A More Forceful China."

While it was a relief to finally be able to access direct
knowledge on these sensitive domestic issues, as someone who grew up in a
middle-class family in suburban Beijing, I had difficulty connecting the
Orwellian China described in western media to the one I recognized. Then,
working at the New York Times Beijing bureau, I witnessed a different side of
China. As I picked up phone calls from petitioners who had fallen ill working
in toxic factories and interviewed a Uighur intellectual who was hunted by the
government for his "separatist tendency," their narratives muted the defense of
China I had long muttered to myself. It saddened me that the powerless in China
had to resort to foreign media to find a voice. It depressed me when I pictured
my non-Chinese college friends skimming these headlines, shaking their heads at
my country.

Though many
Chinese students come to the United States to absorb ideas from a society that
encourages free exchange of opinions, this much-admired quality can become
thorny when the discourse centers on China. To make peace with these criticisms,
they are learning first to make peace with themselves.

Joy Zhuang,
a graduate student majoring in international relations at Syracuse University
and an intern at American Enterprise Institute, loves American television dramas.
They helped her learn the language as well as the society before she came here
to study, she said. Her favorite was "Boston Legal," which she explained shows
her "the collision of different values in America."

Zhuang,
interested in the development and function of NGOs, maintains a blog titled "I Study
NGO Management in America," where she posts reflections on this topic and
others. In July, after a high-speed train wreck left 40 people dead in eastern
China, she wrote a post pressing the country's state-controlled media for greater
transparency. "I would rather have rumors than have lies," she wrote. In the
fall, as Occupy Wall Street kindled popular protests across the United States, Zhuang
stopped by Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., to watch the demonstrations. "I
always believe people's grievances should be channeled instead of blocked," she
reflected. "In China, even when the government makes large moves such as
demolishing and relocating rural villages, it never gives the residents a
chance to speak and just settles everything with money."

Zhuang is an
unwavering proponent of dialogues and free expression, though American
discourse about China has at times tested her patience. "Foreign policies
toward China only enters mainstream discussion in America in recent years," she
said, "because now it needs help from China." She added, frustrated, "On the
one hand, [America] praises China for the role it plays on the international
stage. On the other hand, it tells its citizens about China's investment in
clean energy and technology and argues that America needs to do more in order
to not fall behind. That's not the way you speak about a friend [in Chinese
social norms] ... it hurts feelings."

She especially
dislikes when Western voices predict China's political doom. She is still
bothered by an American teacher's comment, while lecturing on China's aging
population, that the nation will "get old before it gets rich." She bristles at
mass media speculations on the possibility of an "Arab Spring" toppling the
Communist Party in China. "If you ask Chinese people, they will tell you all
they want now is, for example, free media. But America always calls for 'the
collapse of the Communist Party' or 'a multi-party system.' It's too radical." Zhuang
believes that gradual change will take place in China through its burgeoning civil
society, which she said Western media tends to overlook.

When Lawrence
Guo, a soft-spoken, bespectacled boy from the bustling city of Tianjin, learned
about Liu Xiaobo winning the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, he deliberately avoided both
Chinese and American media coverage of the prize. He did not want to "be
trapped in one side of opinions," he explained. He maintains that democratic
reform should proceed cautiously. "I might sound like a Chinese bureaucrat," he
chuckled. "Human rights is indeed a sensitive topic in China, but that doesn't
mean no one in the government wants to improve the situation. Western
governments are pushing it too hard, so it's counterproductive."

Guo, like
Zhuang, embraces public debate in America and takes advantage of the vibrant campus
environment. Now a second-year student at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies (SAIS) with a concentration in Latin American studies, he
is learning Portuguese. ("Democratic reforms in Latin American countries do not
follow a smooth trajectory either," he did not forget to add.)

"Sometimes
I think [discussing political matters] is just the government's means of living.
It's their job." Guo tries not to take the U.S. government's criticisms of China
personally. "America is not only attacking China, it's also self-criticizing
all the time." He also separates these criticisms from the opinions of the
people he interacts with in daily life, whom he thinks are quite friendly to
China. In his class at SAIS, China mostly comes up in the context of its
economic miracle, which evokes admiring remarks from his classmates. "It makes
me feel proud to be a Chinese," Guo recalled, smiling.

Zhuang,
too, tries to reason away the angst she can feel on hearing harsh American
criticisms of China. "I am not a Chauvinist, and I have a strong sense of
morality. If our government does things wrong, it should be criticized," she said.
"But as a Chinese, I cannot disconnect myself with this identity, and sometimes
I still feel upset." Difficult as it is for her to digest these criticisms, she
eagerly swallows them all. She faithfully attends every roundtable discussion
about China her think tank hosts and tracks the event calendars of other major political
institutes in Washington. She is grateful that such discussions exist for her
to roam into. "Among my peers in China, if you care about anything deeper, they
will say, 'Come on, why are you so idealistic?'" she said, lifting her tone to
imitate their air. "Being in America actually makes you feel better. People
don't judge."

Zhuang's
friend Andy Liu, a former Chinese Central Television anchor who just completed
his master's in public diplomacy at Syracuse University, described his feelings
toward China and America in human terms: "China as my birthplace feels like my
parent, whom I can't choose but naturally love. America is like someone I'm dating,
with whom I experienced crush, disappointment, and finally settled into a
mature relationship." To achieve this inner balance, Liu has had to distance
himself from his Chinese perspective. "I can now observe China as a third party,
a skill I have intended to learn. Of course my attachment to China maintains,
but now it's the difference of seeing it inside or outside Lushan."

Liu was
referring to a Chinese poem by the 11th century poet Su Shi, who encapsulated the
science of perspective in verses now recited by every Chinese elementary school
student:

Sideways a
mountain range, vertically a peak.
Far-near,
soaring-crouching, never the same.
No way I
can tell the true shape of Mt. Lushan,
Because I
am standing in the middle of this mountain.

About the Author

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The new version of Apple’s signature media software is a mess. What are people with large MP3 libraries to do?

When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title.

Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced. Which makes sense: Like the web itself, his schema was shipped, good enough,and an improvement on the vacuum which preceded it. Those three big tags, as they’re called, work well with pop and rock written between 1960 and 1995. This didn’t prevent rampant mislabeling in the early days of the web, though, as anyone who remembers Napster can tell you. His system stumbles even more, though, when it needs to capture hip hop’s tradition of guest MCs or jazz’s vibrant culture of studio musicianship.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A leading neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity shares her research on where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ—and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness.

As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies creativity, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many gifted and high-profile subjects over the years, but Kurt Vonnegut—dear, funny, eccentric, lovable, tormented Kurt Vonnegut—will always be one of my favorites. Kurt was a faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1960s, and participated in the first big study I did as a member of the university’s psychiatry department. I was examining the anecdotal link between creativity and mental illness, and Kurt was an excellent case study.

He was intermittently depressed, but that was only the beginning. His mother had suffered from depression and committed suicide on Mother’s Day, when Kurt was 21 and home on military leave during World War II. His son, Mark, was originally diagnosed with schizophrenia but may actually have bipolar disorder. (Mark, who is a practicing physician, recounts his experiences in two books, The Eden Express and Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, in which he reveals that many family members struggled with psychiatric problems. “My mother, my cousins, and my sisters weren’t doing so great,” he writes. “We had eating disorders, co-dependency, outstanding warrants, drug and alcohol problems, dating and employment problems, and other ‘issues.’ ”)

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.